What actually worked, for two thousand years

43 BC – AD 17

Publius Ovidius Naso was born in Sulmo, in the mountains east of Rome, on 20 March 43 BC. He became the most famous poet in Rome and wrote the Metamorphoses, which people still read. In AD 2 he published Ars Amatoria — The Art of Love — a handbook in three parts: how to find someone, how to keep them, and then, in part three, the same advice written for women. Six years later the emperor Augustus banished him to Tomis, a town on the Black Sea at the edge of the empire. He spent the rest of his life there writing letters home asking to be let back. He never was. He died in AD 17 or 18. He said he had been exiled for “a poem and a mistake”, and never said which poem or what mistake.

Why we chose them · our reading

Because he wrote the first one. Every book about this that came afterwards is arguing with a handbook from AD 2, usually without admitting it. Our own front page says the material runs “Ovid to Casanova”, so leaving him out was a claim with nothing behind it. He is also the best reason to read these people carefully instead of copying them: some of his advice is genuinely useful and some of it is indefensible, in the same chapter.

c. 69 – 30 BC

The last active ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, and the last of a Macedonian Greek dynasty that had held the throne for nearly three centuries. She came to power at about eighteen, was deposed by her brother's court and took the country back with a Roman army behind her. She is reported to have spoken several languages — unusually for her dynasty, Egyptian among them — and she governed a wealthy, grain-rich state for twenty-one years while Rome tore itself apart. She died in 30 BC, days after Antony, as Octavian took Alexandria.

Why we chose them · our reading

Because the story everyone knows is the barge, and the barge is the least interesting thing about her. She had spent years studying Roman politics before she ever staged an entrance; the theatre worked because the preparation was already done. She is here as the argument against treating presentation as the skill.

1620 – 1705

A French writer, musician and courtesan who ran one of the most consequential salons in seventeenth-century Paris. Her father, a lutenist, taught her to sing and play; she retired from her career as a courtesan in 1671, after which her receptions became both fashionable and respectable, drawing Molière, Scarron and Saint-Évremond. She refused money from lovers, kept her independence in a century that offered women little, and left a bequest in her will for books for the young Voltaire, whose father managed her affairs late in her life. Sources differ on her birth year; 1620 is the most commonly given, 1623 also appears.

Why we chose them · our reading

Because she is the only person in this curriculum who is documented ending things well. A contemporary recorded that no man dared resent his successor. Almost every book about attraction stops at the beginning; she is here for the part after.

1725 – 1798

A Venetian writer and adventurer who was, over a long and unstable life, a seminarian, a soldier, a violinist, a spy, a gambler, a con man and finally a castle librarian in Bohemia. He escaped the Doge's prison in 1756, an episode he retold for the rest of his life. In his sixties, on a physician's advice against melancholy, he wrote Histoire de ma vie — roughly 3,700 pages, and the reason he is remembered as a lover rather than as any of the other things he was.

Why we chose them · our reading

Because the memoir is a better book than the reputation suggests, and the reputation gets the mechanism wrong. What the pages actually show is not conquest but appetite for other people: he asked questions, he was easy to delight, he left before he outstayed his welcome. That is a skill and it is teachable. His exits from responsibility are not.

1721 – 1764

Born Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, a Parisian financier's daughter with no birth claim on the French court. She met Louis XV in 1745 and was installed at Versailles within months, made Marquise de Pompadour the same year. The physical relationship ended around 1750; she remained his closest companion and de facto adviser for another fourteen years, commissioning architecture, patronising Voltaire and the Encyclopédie, and shaping the court's taste until her death in 1764.

Why we chose them · our reading

Because she kept the attention of a famously bored king for nineteen years, and only five of those involved sleeping with him. Whatever held the other fourteen was not desire. She is here as the case that being interesting outlasts being wanted.

1788 – 1824

A British Romantic poet who woke up famous in 1812 when the first cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were published. The celebrity was of a modern kind — mobbed, gossiped about, merchandised — and it collapsed within four years under scandal and debt into permanent exile. He died at thirty-six at Missolonghi, having gone to fight in the Greek war of independence.

Why we chose them · our reading

Because he is the control case, and this curriculum needs one. Every seduction manual borrows his silhouette — the unavailable, the dangerous, the brooding — and quietly omits the wreckage around it. He is not here to be copied. He is here so that the aesthetic can be looked at with its consequences attached.

1863 – 1938

An Italian poet, novelist and playwright who became one of the most famous writers in Europe, then one of its stranger political figures. He had a long, public affair with Eleonora Duse, the most celebrated actress of the age, during which he wrote his best plays; sources place its end between 1904 and 1910. In 1919 he seized the city of Fiume with a private force and ruled it for fifteen months. Wikipedia records the historical verdict plainly: he is "credited with partially inventing Italian fascism", and has been called "the John the Baptist of Italian fascism" for the ritual Mussolini took from him.

Why we chose them · our reading

Because he is the strongest available evidence that attention beats symmetry. He was short, balding and, by contemporary account, unremarkable to look at, and he was nonetheless the most pursued man in Italy. He is also where the method turns: he published his lover's intimacy as a novel while the affair still ran. Preparation aimed at understanding someone is attention; identical preparation aimed at engineering them is a con.

1869 – 1916

A Siberian peasant who, after a pilgrimage and a religious conversion in 1897, travelled as a strannik — a wanderer — and reached the imperial court. He held no office in the Russian Orthodox Church. His standing rested almost entirely on the Tsarevich Alexei's haemophilia and the Empress's belief that he could help; his calm appeared to settle the household. He was murdered by conservative nobles at the Yusupov Palace in December 1916. Douglas Smith's 2016 biography argues that his political influence was substantially smaller than the legend, and that the rumours did far more damage than the man.

Why we chose them · our reading

Because he is the clearest demonstration that certainty is contagious, and the clearest warning about what that is worth. What he offered an isolated family was total conviction and undivided attention, neither of which the court traded in. Observers read confidence as competence; they were wrong, and the reading still happened. It explains his hold, and it explains why certainty in someone else is not evidence of anything.

1926 – 1962

Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, an American actress who became the most photographed woman of her century and one of its most consistently underestimated performers. She fought her studio for better parts and better terms, formed her own production company in 1955, and studied at the Actors Studio in New York. She read seriously and wrote — her notes and poems were published in 2010 as Fragments. She died in 1962 at thirty-six.

Why we chose them · our reading

Because of one anecdote that does more work than any theory. Susan Strasberg described walking through Manhattan beside her, entirely unrecognised, until she asked: "Do you want to see me be her?" Nothing changed that a camera could have caught, and a crowd formed. Presence was a thing she switched on. If it can be switched on it was built, and if it was built it can be learned.

1906 – 1975

Born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, she arrived in Paris at nineteen and became the highest-paid entertainer in Europe. She renounced her US citizenship and became French in 1937. During the Second World War she worked for French military intelligence, carrying information written in invisible ink on sheet music and sheltering refugees at her château; she was awarded the Resistance Medal and the Croix de Guerre and made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. She spoke at the 1963 March on Washington. In 2021 she was honoured at the Panthéon — the first Black woman to be — though the casket interred there holds soil from places she lived; her remains are in Monaco.

Why we chose them · our reading

Because on her first Paris night she was handed material built on somebody else's racist fantasy and made it hers by refusing to play it straight — crossing her eyes, puffing her cheeks, being funny where the script wanted exotic. Play beat polish in the least forgiving room imaginable. It is also the entry that most needs its caution read: subverting that framing was survival before it was charm.